05 Genesis
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Hi, I'm PJ Vogt. This is the Crypto Island miniseries. In this episode, we take a trip from the very beginning of cryptocurrency and we see where its strange prophecies have led today. Search Engine is brought to you by PolicyGenius. It is very easy to put something important off because you do not have the time or patience to deal with it. And finding the perfect life insurance policy is a pretty good example. 40% of people with life insurance wish they'd gotten their policy at a younger age.

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A lot of people already know the origin story of Bitcoin, but I'm just going to recite it one more time. It is fall of 2008. Good evening.

George W. Bush is president. Lehman Brothers has just collapsed. Number one movie in the country, Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Number one song in the country, T.I.'s Whatever You Like. This is where I would play a clip for you, but the podcast budget does not really allow a fair use lawyer. You'll just have to imagine it.

On Halloween of that year, 2008, a person claiming to be a Japanese man named Satoshi Nakamoto appears on a cryptography mailing list to announce his new invention. He describes this invention in a white paper. It's called Bitcoin, a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. This white paper, it's an elegant document. Text runs just eight pages long, minus footnotes. In precise academic language, he describes the problem he set out to solve. Quote,

Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

Obviously, we don't know who Satoshi really is, but this is as close as I could get to the voice I hear in my head when I read this. And when I read it, I don't really try to follow the technical description. I just listen for this voice. Calm, academic to the point of being pretty dry. Nothing about this white paper, to me, screams impending revolution. Quote, digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double spending.

We propose a solution to the double spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. What Satoshi is saying is that there will now be electronic cash, money native to the internet. And when that money is spent, the ledger of who has it and who sold it will be kept by the users, not by a centralized bank, not by a third-party company. Satoshi's white paper does not explicitly describe an ideology, but a worldview thrums through it. You can find it if you know where to look.

For instance, the Genesis block, the very first recorded transaction on Satoshi's ledger, which he himself mines just a few months after publishing the white paper. Satoshi embeds in that Genesis block an actual headline from a newspaper. The London Times, 3rd of January 2009. Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. This text embedded into the blockchain, embedded into the blockchain forever.

Countries, normally, put presidents on their money. Satoshi, instead, has stuck a newspaper headline on his that, presumably, he felt a way about. "Government prints money to save bankers' asses." Maybe that's what Satoshi wanted everyone to think about whenever they used his blockchain. I can't help but see this white paper as a bible of some new religion. Over the next 13 years, Bitcoin will become popular, arguably, to some people, even useful. And it will certainly find its adherence.

This vision Satoshi Nakamoto is trying to call into existence, strangers will see that vision. It'll give them their own visions of the future, futures they want, where they're free from the lives they're bound to. And they will follow this vision with a religious fervor. Some very weird people will get rich. Alongside Bitcoin, many new coins will spawn, each presenting not just a new version of how this technology can work, but within a slightly tweaked vision of a different new future.

And each time led by a different nerdy, charismatic figurehead. You'll have your Vitalik Buterins, your Charles Hoskinsons, Elon Musk will end up in there somehow. Crypto, which outsiders like me will see as a monolithic, coherent world of crypto bros, will actually be a deeply balkanized world of competing tribes, loyal to different futurists. But it's the original group, the Bitcoiners, the cult of Satoshi Nakamoto, who will seem, at least to me, the strangest.

And to try to understand them, to understand the world which this white paper has called into being, I will find myself on a very hot April weekend in Miami, alone in a bathroom with a small tape recorder at a very large conference. So here we go. So it's the first day of Bitcoin Miami, supposedly the world's largest Bitcoin conference, and

And I've just left a somewhat quiet bathroom to re-enter the hulking complex that is the convention center. Miami Convention Center, a deeply nondescript large building with some palm trees outside of it. Inside, so many people. And they paid a lot of money to be here. The week of the conference, regular passes were going for around $1,000. The expensive tickets, the whale passes, were going for $21,000. The best estimates I see say that 25,000 people are here.

The floor feels like a mix of normal looking people and some genuine weird. It's like a lot of interesting outfits. There's two guys in flight suits. People who look like they got lost on the way to Burning Man or like extras in a novelty rap video.

A lot of gold Bitcoin chains, indoor sunglasses, women with QR codes on their butts, another flight suit. I run into a German guy with a t-shirt that's just Satoshi's headline, the one he printed in the Genesis block. Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. You could spend a whole day here just reading the t-shirts. I see a bunch bashing fiat money, money issued by government, like it's a rival sports team. Anti-fiat social club t-shirt.

I'm in a place where people are rooting for a currency like it's their country. In fact, they've printed out a copy of the Declaration of Independence, a room-sized version, but they've changed it so that now it's about Bitcoin. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the monetary bonds which have enslaved them to a fiat system of government decree.

If I sound like I'm at a funeral here, it's not because I'm a Declaration of Independence purist. I'm just feeling a little self-conscious, standing in a room full of people, talking to a recorder. But my approach today is to be a rookie grad student. I'm going to go to every panel. I'm going to take lots of notes. I want to document the different groups of people drawn to Bitcoin. The followers assembled at this very strange mecca. Chapter one, the fundamentalists.

So my first stop is this big room called the Genesis Stage. Five men sitting on stage on leather couches in front of a backdrop of the Bitcoin logo against some palm trees. I'd chosen this talk out of all the others because it had a great title, Wartime Bitcoin.

My assumption was that the panelists here would be talking about something I was really curious about, the war in Ukraine. An unprecedented amount of crypto has been donated to the Ukrainian side this year. That's what I thought they'd be talking about. I was wrong.

Wartime Bitcoin actually meant the secret war that some Bitcoiners believe is being waged against Bitcoin by the global elites. Yeah, this is definitely a powerful panel. I hope there's not a drone strike that's going to take all of us out. This would be a big loss to the freedom community. But I would start off by saying I think it's fair to say that there's a war on for people's minds, but I would even go further and say that there's a war on for people's minds.

and say that there's a financial war happening right now by a lot of big banks, central controllers. They're launching bombs of inflation. Some people would call it a controlled demolition of the economy. Financial war, bombs of inflation, a controlled demolition of the economy. It's as if that fairly subtle note of frustration at the banks in Satoshi's white paper, it has blossomed into this potent cocktail of conspiracy and rage.

Here's one panelist talking about actually confronting one of the bailout's architects in person, former Fed Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke. I remember seeing Ben Bernanke there after the 2008 financial crisis, and I went up to him and specifically asked him, how does it feel creating one of the biggest banker bailouts in human history, conducting the largest transfer of wealth, giving trillion dollars to your private banking friends while everyone else is struggling out there to live?

Ben Bernanke was a little surprised by that question and then literally tried to take the recorder out of my hand and rip it out of me. Here you go. Luke Rutkowski, the man telling the story, is a YouTuber slash survivalist. His all caps T-shirt reads, Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself. Just to give you a sense of this panel's vibe, Luke is the moderator.

This rage against the banks, the governments, against central authority, this is what unites the five panelists who have come from all over.

Australia, Italy, the US, two Canadians, one a spokesman from the Canadian trucker protests, the other a French Canadian who's wearing a camo vest with a patch that says in Latin, if you want peace, prepare for war. I'm Francis. I'm the founder of Bull Bitcoin. I got into Bitcoin to destroy the Bank of International Settlement and to bring an end to the era of central banking.

And then I got interested in, you know, removing the power from governments into the hands of the citizens and decentralize the governance system. But now I'm staying into Bitcoin to take revenge on the governments and for what they did to us. And we will make them pay. These guys on stage, I'm realizing, are what are called Bitcoin maximalists, maxis. I've seen them online. I've never seen them in the flesh.

The most hardcore Maxis believe that Bitcoin will become the only digital currency, perhaps the world's main currency, full stop. They're Bitcoin fundamentalists, essentially. To spend time with Maxis is to spend time in a world where the bank bailouts of 2008 were not just bad policy or an example of corrupt American elites protecting their own in a crisis. For Maxis, those bank bailouts had the emotional valence of watching Santa Claus get dragged out of the mall by his beard and shot in front of children.

No one here is over it. No one wants to be over it. Bitcoin will be their revenge. The plan goes like this: The government has power because it controls the money. So take that power away from them. Convert your dollars to Bitcoin. Create a world where there's no bank bailouts, no printing money out of thin air, no Fed chair announcing that inflation is going to rise. Fix the money, the Maxis say, and you can fix the world. That's the idea.

But interestingly, these maxis are equally fired up about the threat to Bitcoin just posed by other cryptocurrencies. All those other coins that toddled after Bitcoin with their own little white papers, those are shitcoins. Those are apostates.

Here's another panelist. And to the point of wartime Bitcoin that we're discussing here is that during wartime, we're going to have governments to battle. We're going to have central banks to battle. But guess what? We're also going to have a whole lot of fucking shitcoiners to battle. And as much as I love the organizers here, like the larger these communities get, the more we get infiltrated with fucking retards who come here and try and shill, try and shill their own shitcoin. Crypto is the attack on fucking Bitcoin. Make no mistake about it. It's the most effective attack.

There's a bunker vibe to the Maxon community, a feeling of perpetual besiegement. As I dutifully walk from talk to talk, notebook in hand. Excuse me. Do you know where meeting room 229 is? I'm realizing these bunker vibes permeate the stages of Bitcoin Miami. I believe in the future and I believe in Bitcoin.

There's no critique of Bitcoin to be found here in any of the talks. I just think that we focus so much on the energy narrative and we shouldn't. We should focus on like what Bitcoin does for the world. There's one panel devoted to discussing Bitcoin's environmental impacts. It's called You Are the Carbon They Want to Reduce. Like the people who say that we should reduce Bitcoin carbon emissions are talking about getting rid of you, a carbon-based life form. These nervous, prickly capitalists. They're a movement. They're fired up.

But they have no leader. Satoshi is anonymous. He does not issue marching orders, which means that other populists step into that vacuum. I see one of them that afternoon in the Nakamoto Arena. Okay, I'm walking into the Nakamoto Arena to see Peter Thiel address a very excited crowd.

Peter Thiel is the keynote speaker here. Billionaire PayPal founder, the largest single donor to Republican politicians this year. Well, actually, he's tied with a man named Ken Griffin, who happens to own a copy of the U.S. Constitution. Small world. Anyway, Thiel is gracing the Nakamoto Arena today, an enormous room that could house Thai fighters. Orange laser lights and strobes, thousands of seats. It looks pretty full.

Up at the front, the seats reserved for the whales, those people who spent as much as $21,000 for their wristbands. Hello. The whale seating for Teal's talk, particularly packed. Thank you so much for having me here. It's, uh...

You know, there's so much I was wrong about in 1999, but I thought I'd reflect on some of the things I was thinking at the time. Teal's on stage in a white polo shirt, brown hair, ruddy cheeks. He's holding up what looks to me like a couple hundred dollar bills. Hard to see from my seat. But he's using that paper money as a prop for his talk. And when I was running PayPal, when I was getting it started, the standard way I'd start an investor pitch would, I'd hold up

At this point, Peter Thiel wants to do something that I think he and this room would consider kind of punk rock, like their version of smashing a guitar.

throw the money into the crowd. You know, would the gentleman in the front row like to have the money? But the distance is a little far. Money, not that aerodynamic. Just somebody come up and get it. But they don't know how to throw it out at people. In the end, he settles for folding it up and tossing it underhand like a rookie high school softball pitcher. I thought you guys were supposed to be Bitcoin maximalists, you know?

From there, he continues to serve up more red meat. He shows a slide of Bitcoin versus its biggest competitor, Ethereum. Bitcoin represented by a picture of a burly dude in a MAGA hat. Machine gun pointed at the camera.

Ethereum, just a picture of Ethereum's inventor, Vitalik Buterin. Very skinny fellow who often dresses like he's wearing his favorite pair of pajamas to a sober rave. The crowd eats this up. So this was...

And there's sort of a question, how do we compare and contrast them? And so if we look at the current market caps, $830 billion versus $386 billion of Ethereum. Thiel moves briskly through his argument that basically, while Ethereum is fairly valued, Bitcoin in the future could have parity with the equities market, meaning the price could rise 100x. This here is the truest rallying cry for the Bitcoiners.

Obviously, Thiel is a Republican, but with this, he is uniting a room filled with all sorts of political beliefs. All these people rooting for this one future, rooting that the number will go up. And now Thiel moves to the encore, to his big finish. And so I want to maybe end with, you know, an enemies list. A list of people who are holding back Bitcoin. He starts naming those enemies, posting their pictures on the Jumbotron.

Enemy number one. I think the sort of the sociopathic grandpa from Omaha is, you know, is perhaps the most honest and the most direct in it. The sociopathic grandpa from Omaha is how Thiel's referring to Warren Buffett, a 91-year-old billionaire who's committed the high crime of disparaging Bitcoin. He called it rat poison squared.

Enemies list goes on. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon won't invest in Bitcoin. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has also so far abstained. They are the finance gerontocracy, Thiel closes by telling the room. And it's up to them, the youth, to prevail. And we have to just go out from this conference and take over the world. Thank you very much.

Sitting here as people stream out a Teal's talk, I have this feeling I'll get over and over again in Miami. I feel uneasy, like physically in my stomach. I feel like I'm watching the genesis of something bigger than I can really comprehend.

I breathe.

And I noticed right away, there's sort of a refreshing disconnect between the amped up war machine on stage and its intended audience, the actual people at this conference. Outside, there's no army massing for war. I just see a festival. There's loud music from the sound money stage. It's a currency pun. There's a line of food trucks where you could spend $18 on a poke bowl if you're not careful.

And then there's this. Every festival, of course, has the thing you're supposed to take a selfie in front of. Here, it's a gigantic plastic statue they're calling the Miami Bowl. It's like the Wall Street Bowl, but instead of old bronze, this one looks like a robot. Glossy black, body covered in circuits, eyes laser blue. Like an actual real-life transformer. Everyone makes a stop at this bowl. What do you think of this bowl? Oh, it's beautiful. Amazing. I want to make one with a similar one.

Put it in my house. I think it's cool. I wish it didn't look so plasticky, you know? It feels really transformative, like crypto. People here are celebrating. It's a party. I keep walking past people getting just snatches of conversation where someone's telling someone a tip for how they could make more money. Lock it in. I'm going to shoot you a text. We'll link up.

The phrase I hear over and over again is financial freedom. Either the freedom to not work, or the freedom at least to just leave a soul-crushing job. Floating among people, catching sentence fragments about nodes and ASIC mining rigs. Honestly, I feel kind of thrilled just to be here understanding the lingo.

I feel like I've been learning French at home for many months and now I'm gambolling around Paris with a baguette under each arm. By early afternoon, the heat is staggering. It's that kind of Florida heat that makes your brain slow down and sputter, like a computer from the 90s. I pilot myself inside to the air-conditioned exhibitors hall. Alright, this is the exhibition room.

Smells like new rugs. This big room where the conference's hundreds of sponsors are all trying to outdo each other with elaborate spectacles. Cash App, who is sponsoring it, has a huge display. There's a giant actual volcano with smoke coming out of it and a quote from Nakamoto. The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime. Oh, and it's an enormous stone. God, I wonder if Satoshi Nakamoto knew how much marketing copy he was writing.

It's here, wandering around the exhibitors hall, far away from the maxis on stage with their microphones, that'll meet the people whose faith is the real engine for this movement. After the break, Chapter Two: Pilgrims. Surge Engine is brought to you by Greenlight. A new school year is starting soon. My partner has two young kids, both of whom use Greenlight. And honestly, it's been kind of great.

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Welcome back to the show. Chapter two.

Pilgrims. So I'm walking through the sponsor area, genuinely just appreciating all these lunatic brand activations. This is a weird sort of light chamber that I don't understand. It's very cool looking. It kind of looks like the set for Mo Money Mo Problems. I noticed two women in the tube who just seem to be having a wonderful time. Can I ask you guys, are you guys having fun? Oh, we're having the best time. I saw you taking pictures in that tube of light thing. Yes, the Nexo Tunnel. What is that?

What is the Nexo Tunnel? I have no idea. It is a space of enjoyment, imagination, and power. It looks like a good place to take your picture to go on Instagram. Hello! Lanu and Marnita. Lanu flew from Hawaii to be here, 16 hours. She's Polynesian, curly hair, floral blouse, high heels.

Marnita came in from Colorado. She's black. She's dressed more casually. Bright pink sneakers, dreads dyed half white, half this color that's almost like neon kelp. I'm Marnita, the queen connectress. What is a queen connectress? Yes, sir. I am connecting people to financial literacy, investments, cryptocurrency, and blockchain technology. Marnita, not a maxi. She's not preparing for war against the global elites.

But Bitcoin's cultural power, it probably owes more to the fact that so many normal people like her have fallen down this rabbit hole. Hello. How long have you been in crypto? Okay, so you guys, I've only been in crypto for three years and I still feel like a little baby, right? What got you in? Okay, so check this out.

I was looking for something different, right? You know, like every one of us, we struggle with day-to-day life. We're looking for something that can give us financial freedom, something we can base a foundation on, right? So I started praying. Nothing happened. All of a sudden, I'm on Facebook. Yes, Facebook, right? Ha ha ha!

And I'm scrolling and I hear this voice, man. And this voice is yelling about how cryptocurrency is going to bring about the greatest financial revolution that we have ever seen. That voice, it belonged to her cousin Brandon, someone Marnita feels extremely grateful towards. My cousin, Brandon Ivey, all right? He is actually a cryptocurrency and blockchain educator. Crypto educators.

Some call themselves tutors. They're a big part of the scene. I'd been really hoping to meet one here. I wanted to talk to Marnita's cousin Brandon, and she wanted to make the connection, but right now he was AWOL. Oh, he was sitting here. Can you call Brandon for me? Okay, for... Oh, I don't have a card, but he's here. Okay, so check it out. While we wait, she continues the story of how she got into crypto. She'd seen Brandon's post, hadn't initially been that interested, but then she'd noticed something about the comments beneath it.

Just a mix of people there. And it wasn't just like, let's say, people who are less fortunate. It was like people who had a lot of money. It was blacks, it was whites, it was Hispanics. And all of these people were there for a common reason. Freedom, right? And where were you at in your life? Like, what were you doing for work? Okay, so check me out. I was working at the bank. $17 an hour. Ha ha ha!

Talk about irony in the credit card department of all places. That's where I was. I started learning about cryptocurrency and I walked away. This I was like, this is not the way, dude.

I walked away and I started learning about cryptocurrency and I thought because he's my cousin that it was gonna be easy. No. Right? He made me go to work. But that was the best thing he could have ever done for me. What do you mean he made you go to work? He said, "You gotta learn this stuff, girlfriend." I'm not gonna tell you. I could have had it to where I say, "Hey, I have $500, Brandon. Where should I put it?" He said, "No, no, no. Do my course."

There are a lot of these crypto groups. On Facebook, on Telegram, Discord. Some charge, some are free. Many are definitely scams. Crypto tutors who charge money for obvious advice or even accept bribes to push certain coins on their followers without disclosing.

There are also legitimate ones, where groups of people invest together and try to just trade good information. At Bitcoin Miami, I will meet person after person who will refer to the groups or to the crypto tutors who have led them here. Sometimes I'll think, obvious scammer. But a lot of times I'll just wonder, not being able to tell how legit some specific tutor is. Partly just because the Bitcoin price shot up so much after the stimulus during the pandemic that all boats had kind of risen.

So the only information I really have is how the people I'm talking to feel about their experiences, what they tell me. Marnita was really happy with her cousin Brandon. He'd made a big promise about financial freedom. Three years later, that promise was paying off. But of course, it didn't always work out that way. Lanu, Marnita's friend, was also talking to me about financial freedom. And I said to her, you know, the hard thing about those words is I hear them and I just sort of want to pat my pockets to make sure my wallet's still there.

How'd you get burned?

Well, okay, so I'm Polynesian and so there was a self-made billionaire in crypto who was Tongan and I was Tongan so that was very appealing and attractive to me. And like a dummy we're just like, here's our money, take our money, like, you know, because we're just like trusting him to, you know, take the helm and guide us. But he was actually a con artist and he scammed us, took all our money and ghosted us.

So we lost 57K collectively as a family. That's awful. Yes, it is. And it took a big toll on me. And I told myself that I wasn't going to let that happen to anyone. It didn't have to just be my family. If someone was interested in learning more about crypto and I had something to share with them, then I was going to pay it forward. So then I had to take a seat and start learning and start getting educated. Lanu's education happened in Facebook groups and online meetups. She actually met Marnita at one of those online events.

This conference in Miami is their first time hanging out IRL. Lanu believes that understanding crypto means understanding society, understanding that rich people hoard wealth and hoard information they only share with each other. Crypto, for her, it's a way for the 99% to start to help each other the way rich people do.

I don't know. Call it outsider trading. What were you doing before this? I own pawn shops on Maui. So I'm in the pawn industry. That's why Bitcoin made sense to me when I was first introduced to it, because Bitcoin is like digital gold. Lana is a miner. She mines crypto, but not Bitcoin. The computing power required to mine actual Bitcoin is too expensive for her. That space has mostly been taken over by large corporations.

So Lanu mines smaller, more obscure coins. Can I ask how much you're getting a day in mining? 15k passively.

$15,000 a day? Not a day. So a day, well, it's 15K a month. So maybe divide that. How many computers do you have set up? I have currently 14 in my office, and then my husband is working on 22 more. Did you ever think this would be your life? No, I didn't. I love it. It's pretty amazing. I'm going to go get a Bitcoin tattoo right now in the front.

You're for real? You're getting a Bitcoin tattoo? Yeah, Cash App paid tattoo artists to give Bitcoin tattoos for free during convention. So what are you getting and where, if I may ask? So you have to choose from what they have available. And they had a cute Bitcoin symbol that had an X for mining. And it shows the rock. So yeah, because I'm a miner, that's the one I'm going to go with. Lotto and Marnita left for the tattoo booth. Brandon Ivey never appeared.

Something I never knew exactly how to feel about, but saw over and over again, were just people pulling other people into Bitcoin. Every Lanu and Marnita had a brand in Ivy, and were themselves a brand in Ivy to several others. It boggled my mind sometimes, just the scale of it. One idea from a white paper PDF, reproduced over and over, transmitted person to person, gave me that feeling in my stomach again, of witnessing something enormous without knowing yet what that enormity would mean.

The place I felt that enormity at its maximum strength was when I saw a panel essentially of three Brandon Ivies, well, crypto educators, who also happen to be world-famous celebrity athletes. It was at a panel called Pay Me in Bitcoin. I'm so excited to be chatting with three legends right here. Let's get, how are you guys doing? I didn't think there was going to be this many people here. We're good. We're excited to hear and talk about this. Chapter three, the celebrities.

Well, let's just get right into it. On the Nakamoto stage, wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr., quarterback Aaron Rodgers, and tennis star Serena Williams. All three athletes had signed deals with Cash App, the event's sponsor.

Cash App is like Venmo, but with a lot more crypto trading. So Cash App wanted to convince their customers to direct deposit their paychecks and auto invest the money in Bitcoin. Like whatever you get paid from work, just instantly put a percentage towards Bitcoin investing. These athletes on stage were not directly making that pitch. Instead, they were saying that athletes should get paid in Bitcoin.

Here's Serena Williams talking about diversity among Bitcoin holders. I think a lot of people don't realize that women and people of color actually will probably invest sooner and more. And so that's important to know. But it's just having that opportunity, right? So I think we're all here to kind of talk about how we can get that opportunity through Cash App. And it's such an easy way to invest. And it's like you don't really think about it. You just...

Serena Williams of the three was the most conscientious about using the sponsor's name. Odell Beckham Jr., mostly quiet. Aaron Rodgers, Green Bay Packers quarterback, most famous recently for his alternative views on COVID vaccines. He convincingly says that he's taking his NFL salary in Bitcoin now.

He describes his journey to that decision like any athlete, explaining to the hometown why he signed up to play for them this season. So I personally talk to people who've been in the space for a long time who think it's going to 500,000 a coin. And I talk to the crypto analysts at my financial institution who believe it's going to zero. Yeah.

Just because I wanted to hear both sides of the story and enjoy the conversation. And to me, it was a no-brainer. Dressed all in black with a leather jacket and a slicked-back ponytail, Rogers really comes across as a true believer.

extolling the virtues of doing your own research, very big Bitcoin thing, generally reciting Bitcoiner bromides that the room eats directly from his hand. If the Fed keeps printing trillions of dollars, you know, the best defense against inflation, I believe, is Bitcoin. I leave the conference that day just sort of in awe that Aaron Rodgers, Serena Williams, and Peter Thiel are rallying around the same anything.

That night, my journalist friend Liz lets me tag along to this party thrown by a crypto exchange. They've rented the local museum. The party's set in this cavernous room. A woman dressed like a ballerina is doing ballet stuff with a bunch of L-wire lights on her and a ballerina tutu. It's a pretty good spectacle. Feels like what you'd see at a nice wedding party for two crypto barons, I imagine. Pretty soon, I run out of nicotine patches and I head home.

The next day, I'm back at the conference center for another round of talks. But that feeling of dutiful grad student is beginning to wear off. I see my friend Liz. Hey, exhausting. Just like really exhausting. I'm just getting sales fatigue. Like I've had to watch 24 hours of a QVC pitch for one product. So around 4 p.m. that day, I decided to skip the next talk and I leave the building.

Outside, the Miami heat continues to swelter, 80 degrees verging on 200. I pass back by the conference entrance, where organizers are handing out schwag. Orange Bitcoin sunglasses and bottles of water, I'll take one of those. Everything Bitcoin is always orange. I find myself out on the sidewalk, on a cloudless day, on the corner of Convention Center and 17th. Two street preachers have set up shop. One is the traditional kind, an older woman with a sign preaching that Jesus is the only way.

I try to listen respectfully, but I'm a little distracted because someone's playing a song on an electric violin nearby, and I can almost but not quite figure out what it is. Only one song! Only one! You got one song you're going to give it for me? Look at me. Look at this lady.

Isn't she lovely? It's "Isn't She Lovely?" Okay, so your sign says, "Jesus loves you. He's coming. Repent." You're doing great. No!

If you buy one, insurance you don't pay. After that. About 10 feet away, there's another street preacher. This one is different. This one is actually a kind of person I thought I'd never see at Bitcoin Miami. A dissenter. That's after the break.

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Welcome back to the show. Chapter four.

The apostate. For two days, I've been in a place where pretty much everyone seems to share the exact same beliefs. Bitcoin is financial freedom. You should buy Bitcoin. You should convince your family to buy Bitcoin. Here, outside on the sidewalk, I'm going to witness this movement encounter a person who disagrees with them. An apostate.

I have a soft spot for all apostates, but this one in particular. This street preacher wearing a Gilligan's Island bucket hat standing outside the Bitcoin convention peddling an anti-Bitcoin message. That's evil. Hey, what up? How's it going? Pretty good, how about you? How's business? Oh, great. It's been great. Okay, so say your name and what you're doing out here. My name is Abram Horner. I'm from California, and I'm out here preaching the gospel to people.

and trying to tell them that Bitcoin really cannot save them. It cannot save the world. Only Jesus Christ can. Tell me what your sign says. One side says, the love of money is the root of all evil with a little Bitcoin symbol because Bitcoin, a lot of people are thinking of it as the new money. So a lot of people are here because...

They believe in the promise that Bitcoin can decentralize finance. But then a lot of people are just here because they want to show off their Lambos and like, I got rich off Bitcoin and you can too. But really, they're just creating a new Ponzi scheme. When Abram read the white paper, he saw a promise, not of a world where people got rich, but of a new tool that everyone could use. So what he sees at this conference, it disappoints him.

Plus, he points out, wasn't the whole point of the white paper to create a currency unencumbered by profiteering middlemen? So, like, this event is sponsored by Cash App, another middleman. So why would Cash App be sponsoring a Bitcoin event? Because in theory, they're the competition, right? Bitcoin, if it worked. Right. They would lose their profit, their margin. So why would they be doing this if it's a peer-to-peer? Because they figured out a way to stay in control using Bitcoin.

So I got to say, I don't usually talk to street preachers with such a cogent take on the financial system. Well, Craig Wright, the inventor of Bitcoin who won the lawsuit here in Miami, proving that he is the inventor of Bitcoin himself was a pastor. Craig Wright. I should tell you, there's another side to Abram's sign, the back, where he exhorts people to follow Craig Wright. Craig Wright, very much persona non grata here at Bitcoin Miami.

His crimes, he claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, which they don't like. And he's encouraged people to turn away from Bitcoin to use a different coin. So that's the conclusion to Abrams' whole argument, that everyone is here worshiping a fake Bitcoin and they should follow the real one. Craig writes alternative Bitcoin. If none of what I've said upsets you, you probably weren't at Bitcoin Miami. The most dramatic moment I will witness in my time here, and for me, of course, my favorite, is when I was in the

It starts because this man who's simply walking by, middle-aged guy in a polo shirt with a software company logo on it, he comes up, reads the front of Abram's sign, the less provocative part, and asks a little angrily, "Are you saying Bitcoin's evil?" "I'm not saying Bitcoin is necessarily evil the way it was designed, but the question is, why would Cash App sponsor this event?"

I don't know. Your point is peer-to-peer, right? Yeah. So why do you need Cash App? You don't. Okay, so why would Cash App sponsor it then?

Because they're helping to implement Bitcoin. I mean, it's an open protocol. Anybody can use it. It's not like controlled by the U.S. dollar where only the Federal Reserve 12 banks are allowed to participate. I could write a software application tomorrow that runs on Lightning. You know, Cash App can write one too. It's an open protocol, just like the Internet. It's an open protocol for anyone. This guy is getting pretty heated up. And he hadn't even seen the back of the sign yet. Abram's spiel about Cash App is working much less well on him than it had on me.

And then Abram decides to escalate things a little bit more. He invokes the holy document. Lightning is not in the white paper. There's nothing about second layer solutions in the white paper. That there's no centralized control. There's no evil person controlling lightning. Also,

How is there centralized control? This third voice you hear, that is a new fighter who has entered the arena. A white guy holding a drink, younger, in a bucket hat with piercing blue eyes and a whale wristband. I later find out he's a Bitcoin rapper named Captain Youth.

Right now, Captain Youth and the polo shirt guy, they're teaming up. I think Bitcoin is the furthest thing from evil. I think Bitcoin is probably the most godly thing there is. The real Bitcoin, Craig Wright, the inventor, was actually a pastor before. What does that mean, though? That means that he made Bitcoin to benefit rich and poor people. But right now, poor people cannot use BTC. I've been in this conversation before. I mean, not this one, but...

I've seen pro-life people ask pro-choice people, when do you think life begins? These passionate, angry, completely talking past each other conversations, they're basically what America is made out of. But I've never heard it happen over two different kinds of Bitcoins.

That's why they're the back of your sign the back of your sign at the very top. It says Craig Wright, right? That's an individual that's centralization Satoshi who's the leader of Bitcoin? Satoshi is anonymous Craig like frames claims to be the associate. This is this is a name, right? This is a real name untied to it at any of a person. This is anonymous This isn't tied to anybody in court that he isn't though proven in court. Yeah, Greg Wright even move one Satoshi. He did

He did, right in front of Gavin and Jason. He didn't! He didn't! What block? What block? What block? Now that he won the case, why doesn't he move the coins? The thing is, he just won a lawsuit here proving that he is the sole inventor. And who's the determiner of won a lawsuit? A jury. A jury? A jury. Related to a government?

This is where Captain Youth rests his case. Not by pointing to other possible holes in Abram's argument, but on the idea that Abram would ever place his trust in a jury, a symbol of centralized authority. I don't know how you prove anything, really, if all centralized authority is suspect, but no one solves that problem, or any other problem here on the sidewalk.

The apostate keeps fighting as the afternoon sun begins to dip. Chapter 5. The Crypto Tutor.

This whole time I've been wanting to meet a crypto tutor, an educator, and it finally happens because of Abram. A few minutes after Captain Youth leaves in disgust, another man comes up to argue with Abram. This man has a long beard, platinum grill, three or four gold chains.

This man and Abram, their debate doesn't last very long. It ends with Abram inviting the man to a party he's hosting. Abram, the street preacher, also apparently hosting a party. Who knew? Where's the party, man? It's at the Treehouse. You know where the Treehouse is? Here in Miami. Okay. Come on down. It starts at 6 o'clock. You get a free drink or don't drink. It's up to you. You have a wonderful day. You too, man.

The man with the beard is part of a crypto crew called the KP Primates. They bought a mutant ape from the Bored Ape Yacht Club. They built a whole community around it. I started asking him about the KP Primates crew, and he motions me over to the BMW that they're packed into. I can meet the guys. These guys in the Beamer. Yeah, we can come over here and talk. Hey man, you want to know about what we do?

Yeah, I'm curious what you guys are up to. The man in the front passenger seat is a crypto tutor. He says he's on a mission to educate people about crypto. Let's say our nationality group, there's not too many people that are actually pushing crypto or actually pushing knowledge of crypto. We're actually doing it with no charge. We're actually not charging nobody. We're just trying to get more and more people to get into crypto so that we can all teach each other together. You're saying like because a lot of the people here are white. Yeah, well, yeah.

or just not black right yeah it's yeah like we're like at like like 25 to 1 out here as far as as not being our people here so as far as that we're trying to show people that that these assets are what we need to be getting into because as kids we were never taught to actually invest in assets or or banking or taxes or nothing like that they really just set us out here to crash for ourselves and

And so we're actually trying to come back and double back and teach people how to actually use assets to just reach financial freedom. So how did you get into all this?

I started with XRP and I ain't gonna lie, I started following a guy's TikTok because he was talking about spiritual planes and celestial guidance and stuff like that. Are you into that stuff? Yeah, for sure. And then from there... So he went from celestial guidance to XRP. The coin XRP has a less than sterling reputation in crypto. The company behind it is being sued by the SEC. But that didn't seem to be an issue for the KP primates. So I got into XRP and then from XRP I got into all crypto. And what year is that?

that was last year oh so you're pretty new to all this i am i'm new i sold my rolls royce for crypto really yeah so i have a picture i had a rolls royce on 26s i was the only person with a rolls a ghost on 26 inch wheels and uh i i sold that two more cars and i got straight into crypto like

Oh, that's a beautiful car. Is that your handle, CryptoPimp.Eth? Yep, that's my handle, CryptoPimp.Eth. How do you feel about the Bitcoin white paper? Have you read it? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I've read a couple white papers, and it's like...

Centralized, decentralized. At the end of all of this, I feel like we're going to have to have it centralized. I don't believe that America or even the EU is going to allow us to be free. That's it. And sorry, like I know that we're centralized, decentralized. But at the same minute, I say for full adoption, we're going to have to be fully regulated and fully doxed.

Not that anyone asked me, but the Crypto Pimp's predictions about both the likelihood of crypto regulation and the inevitability of systems towards greater centralization totally mirrors my analysis. He tells me where to find his Instagram and his Discord, and then he and the crew take off. And those gentlemen just drove away in their very nice BMW. I'll look them up later and see that the KP primates are trying to build a strip club in the metaverse. What a world.

That night, I pop by a party run by a DAO where I learn how small talk works at a Web3 party. Are you in the NFT space? No. Are you? What have you got? I got some good stuff. I got some nice stuff. I got the Aves. You got Aves? Yeah, board Aves, I got the new Aves. Nice. Clonex is my favorite though. What's Clonex? I feel like I've seen enough. I go back to the hotel to sleep. The next day is the final day of the conference.

Walking in for the last day of the Bitcoin conference. They turned it into a music festival against everyone's better judgment. Outside on the big lawn, warmongering and crypto shilling have given way to a music festival. Steve Aoki is playing later, but first, several hours of war. I am seeing the most motionless music festival I've ever seen in my life. Somebody's DJing, white guy in a white t-shirt is DJing on stage, and no one is moving. They're just like...

Some people sitting. Oh, one woman. They found one woman dancing and they've immediately put her on the Jumbo Tron because she's a kind of miracle. That's outside. Inside, standing next to the giant Cash App volcano. Ryan! I find Ryan Broderick. Hey, how's it going? Great. Ryan's an internet culture reporter. He has this newsletter called Garbage Day.

Ryan was at the conference with his dad, Paul Broderick. Conveniently, the last type of person I was hoping to meet at this conference. Chapter six, the horse trader. Ryan's dad started investing in crypto during the pandemic, but he had never met crypto people before. Miami was his introduction. Ryan's dad is a pure investor, a middle class guy, a retired former assistant clerk magistrate.

Not here because he believes in the new world order. Not here because he believes in financial freedom. Just a guy playing around in a weird new kind of stock market. I was very, very curious to see how all this insanity had landed on him. The problem was, Ryan's dad was nowhere to be found. He'd wandered off to a virtual reality yacht experience. You're on a yacht and then you put on VR glasses to see it? Yeah, but you pay a lot of money to do it though. Oh. Obviously. Obviously. But it's less money than just a normal yacht.

Eventually, we tracked him down. Forewarning here, you're going to hear me giggling a lot off mic in this interview. I'm sorry. Just really something about the way Paul Broderick spins a yarn. He told me his crypto adventure started one night when he and his son Ryan were drinking and talking about the price of Bitcoin. Seven months ago, my son and I were sitting at a bar and he said, hey,

Historically, it dips in October and it bounces in November. I said, "You really believe that?" He said, "Yeah." And he's a liberal, but he saw that on a conservative news channel. I said, "Okay, let's put $1,000 each on Ethereum and Bitcoin."

"Yeah, I don't want to do a thousand," he said, "but we'll just do 500." So we put 500 each one. While we're sitting there having dinner at the bar, it went up $800 on our investment.

I was the son he was talking about, yes. And he's talking about a Fox business host. I think her name is Susan. And she's pretty good. And I opened Twitter and she's like, you should buy the dip now. And I was like, I wonder what that would do. Let's see. And it worked. Yeah. For a little bit. And then we kind of lost those gains. But yeah. Susan on the Fox business. She's very credible.

As a matter of fact, she'll contradict the host a lot. Prior to coming to this, how much were you participating in Bitcoin culture? No, I wasn't in the culture at all. See, back when, in the 80s and 90s, I used to raise and sell Arabian horses. I had a farm in New Hampshire, 50 acres, indoor riding hall, show barn. And we would have conventions very similar to the one we're sitting in now.

were all the side booths, insurance, transportation. I would... They were conventions like this, except they weren't selling Bitcoin. They were selling horse semen. Horse semen or horses? Horses. Well, and semen to make more horses. So I read up on the Arabian horse market and kind of a crazy moment in 1980s America.

The Arabian horse craze happened because at the time, a quirk of Reagan-era tax laws meant that the ultra-wealthy could buy expensive horses, but then use them to slash their tax bills. That drove up demand, which created middlemen like Ryan Stad. If you wanted to buy a horse from him, you'd fly to Kansas City, where a four-seater jet would pick you up to take you to the breeding farm in nearby Glidden, Iowa. For Ryan Stad, it was expensive. Paying for the farm, training the horses...

Housing was $400 a month. Then we had our trainer who trained them, would take them to shows and show them off. How do people make money off of... We sell them. What's the horse market? And what you would call now is a pyramid. We would sell it to him. He would sell it to her. She would sell it to you. And somebody ended up with a hot potato at the end. An Arabian horse.

The 80s were crazy. Now this was the 80s. For a glorious moment, Ryan's dad was making money hand over fist. And he was learning a lesson he could apply later. Just because something was kind of ridiculous, it didn't mean he couldn't make money off of it. Just so long as he wasn't the one stuck holding the hot potato in the end. All this insanity in Miami, he'd seen it before. He'd survived the horse-crazy 80s. I am seeing basically the same thing.

thing going on just it's probably their kids doing it now when you say the same thing going on what do you mean all the side hacks you know we've got the mining we've got the insurance we've got the um what'd you call it the pick and shovel these are the pick and shovel guys in this exhibit hall so in the gold room have gold but if you're selling them the shovels and the picks very lucrative how do you explain this to your friends

I don't. You know, my days of selling people, you know, and it's kind of like wetting your pants in a gray suit. It really feels good, but no one notices. Ryan, you're a very well-versed internet culture reporter. This is your dad. He's investing in Bitcoin. What do you think when you see that? I'm like, it's just like Arabian horses. I went to a few of those conventions. They're a weird vibe. But they're not. He's right. They are very similar to this.

So, obviously when he first told me he was investing in cryptocurrency, I was extremely worried. But it turns out, like, he was pretty good about it and he was making pretty decent money. It was also good timing for me because I started, like, covering it through him. And I was very upfront about that in my newsletter. I was like, my dad's investing in Bitcoin. I'm going to just study him like a little lab rat.

But I honestly think it's an interesting experience to be with someone who's actively trading it and has been at it for a while, watching the markets with him. I think it's useful. Bitcoin Miami, besides being an unlikely bonding experience, it also helped Ryan just get a better understanding of diehard Bitcoiners. These people that actually both he and I are used to seeing online where they're shrouded behind their laser eyes avatars, but who neither of us had really met in the real world.

Now we shared our sort of updated Game of Thrones opening scene map topography of what the crypto landscape looks like now, having been here. So I went in thinking Ethereum people are the freaks and the scammers and they're bad for the world and Bitcoin people are actually the reasonable ones. I have come away with a more nuanced idea of that dichotomy. Ethereum people, I mean, here they're accused of being too woke, which is blowing my mind.

But they're younger, they're a more vibrant cultural space. One kid we were just talking to outside at the techno party that's happening right now was saying that Ethereum is not currency, it's technology. And I think that is a good way to think about it. Ethereum people, they want to run the whole internet on the blockchain. It's what they call Web3. They're trying to reinvent information technology and combine it with finance. Interesting idea, horrifying, depends on your point of view, I suppose.

Bitcoiners, I have learned, are much more militant about Bitcoin. The Bitcoiners are much more obsessed with redefining how society works in a way that I don't see in the Ethereum community. And what's the society they want?

I think they want to live like medieval barons, but like in Arizona. I mean, that's we were talking about this, but like one of the things that I found, like a dawning realization I had was that if if everyone at this conference is right and they are scooping up all the money that is going to be the money of the world, they do kind of on some level believe that like they are the new haves and they're ahead of the have nots.

That was the dark realization I had. In fact, just before this interview, the group of kids we were talking to, one of which was a libertarian YouTuber, kind of dropped his mask in a way that a lot of Bitcoiners do if you talk to them for long enough or have enough drinks with them, where they start talking very openly about acquiring generational wealth.

And like, I'm not sure if your listeners are familiar with the book Neuromancer, but it's basically about a rich family that lives in space and uses like cloning to like store wealth over centuries. And then they get robbed, thankfully. Spoiler. But that's kind of what the people here are dreaming about. They're dreaming about a way to store their wealth and

for centuries or millennia and have it be able to leave Earth. And they're very serious about it. And, you know, it's kind of goofy. It's like, oh, wow, you're wearing like a Rick and Morty T-shirt and walking around Miami. But then you're like, oh, you are like literally preparing for a world in which you are like an oligarch in space. It's a grim prognosis. It hangs in the air for a minute as conference goers mail past. Are these people going to be my grandchildren's feudal space lords?

I think about the white paper, about all the people it sent on pilgrimage here, for all their strange and personal reasons. Even me. Um, thank you both. You're welcome. You're welcome, PJ. Ryan and Paul Broderick head outside. They want to go see the music festival. They recommend I check out the egg roll guy. Apparently, that's the best food truck. Highly recommend the egg roll truck. Really good.

I walk upstairs, pass some booths to talk to some more people. I'm supposed to meet up with that Bitcoin rapper, Captain Youth. He promised to wrap some bars for me. But now I start to feel really weird. A little bit scared, a little bit of this unreal feeling. My chest starts to tighten. That panicked, uneasy feeling in my stomach, it starts to go off like a fire alarm. I don't know why it's happening. I go to the bathroom to try to find some quiet, but now the bathroom feels really small and I'm trying to find the main door. My tape recorder is still on.

I feel like I'm in a dream. Like, I feel like I'm having a dream. I don't know why. I'm just like, I just walked out of the bathroom past, like, a very wealthy Bitcoin rapper. Wealthy from Bitcoin, not from rapping. Past a friend of mine interviewing Ross Ulbricht's mother. Ross Ulbricht who's in prison for the rest of his life for inventing the Silk Road. And then just, like, the conference room is, like, swarmed with people who have invested, like, some portion of their future in a thing that, like,

Literally, like, I don't know if I'm going to look back at this and think, oh, this is like all these people who are about to get like wiped out or all these people who are going to be like future oligarchs of like a moon planet. Like, I genuinely feel like I feel like I'm I feel like the feeling of like seeing too many futures at the same time and it makes me want to pass out. It's really confusing. Like, I'm not joking or being literary. That's giving me a stomachache.

And now I'm passing by a giant robotic bull that's like, "Oh, what if we took the Wall Street bull and made it not so classy?" And like a woman in a midriff shirt is posing in front of it with her hair blowing in the wind. This is like what it would have been like to be around when they invented acid, but it's money instead. Oh, and now this is the music festival for Bitcoin, a money. The music festival for a kind of money. How did this happen?

Order number 526. Look at this. Look at this. Look. Y'all get one shot. That's gonna be $47. God, Zane! This shit right here ain't gonna look like this soon. Yup. I find myself collapsed on the sidewalk while the guy who runs the egg roll truck, who calls himself "Chinaman," blares out mixtape-style endorsements of his own food.

I'll later realize I'd slapped on two full-strength nicotine patches. The shortest route I've ever found to a panic attack. That's later. For now, heart jitterbugging, I pull myself up to do the one last thing I need to before I can go home. That's it for Crypto Island this week at the Bitcoin Miami conference.

This podcast, I hope I don't need to say this, is not financial advice. If you listen to a person's fever dream in Miami, do not buy Bitcoin off of it. Fact-checking from Elizabeth Moss. Sound design and scoring by the very talented Phil Demachowski and Steven Jackson at the Audio Non-Visual Company. Theme music from Christine Andrews. You can find more episodes of Crypto Island at pjvote.com, where you can also subscribe to my newsletter. Thank you for listening. See you next episode.